oops!

Anonymous — Wed, 7 Jun 2006 11:22:37 -0400

I meant "fare" well...

Plot mapping should only be

Anonymous — Wed, 7 Jun 2006 11:12:12 -0400

Plot mapping should only be considered to help you get the plot in a general order so that you understand it better, but nothing more. In the end, fiction has little to do with plot and much more to do with character and voice. Imagine how Gravity's Rainbow would look mapped out? Or an Alice Munro story? Very few great works of fiction would fair well if too much attention was paid to the mapping of the plot.

Another story model

Andy Wibbels — Thu, 1 Jun 2006 22:00:33 -0400

I was gonna recommend 'How to Write a Movie in 21 Days' by Viki King. She has a really nice, tight story model that you can use to graft your ideas on to.

I've always heard of mapping

rkfoster — Wed, 31 May 2006 12:02:47 -0400

I've always heard of mapping a story plot but was never quite sure how to go about it. This is a great introduction to the process. I think an Author might get easily lost on what is a plus and what is a minus. "A Series of Unfortunate Events" comes to mind where the Author seems to delight in causing problems for the characters. In that case a "problem" might be seen as a positive and a "solution" a negative. :)

What about adding markers for dialogue, action, or other sequences? Or would that just confuse the process?

Use a Story Map to Improve Your Plotting

chrisbrogan — Tue, 30 May 2006 05:34:07 -0400

Imagine yourself in a movie theater. The screen fills with a young man in Philadelphia jogging around, asking out a girl, punching some cow flanks in a meat packing plant, and then hopping into the ring to fight some other guy. That's how boring Rocky would be were there no conflicts and no changes of situation for our hero.

When writing a story, you have an obligation to fulfill: your main character(s) must experience the events you lay before them, and they must react to the conflicts those events provide. Further, the state in which your focal characters find themselves must be either improving or degrading, as a means of moving the story forward towards a conclusion. Without that, the reader is merely being dragged along a flat line towards an ending that they can see a mile away.

Break Out a Map

You might be familiar with the Story Board materials in the D*I*Y Planner Hipster PDA, and perhaps have read Doug's post on agile plotting. The idea behind story mapping is fairly simple and is represented easily by a visual graph. Simply start at the left part of a page, and mark a circle somewhere near the middle of that side of the page. Then, plot out the ups and downs your character will face.

The spots where there's a plateau are where the scenes are mostly expository, filled with descriptions or details. Such scenes are often kept at a bare minimum in a good modern story, as the narrative itself should provide most of what one needs to know. Mark the exposition with an "e".

When something good happens to the character, mark it with a "+." Something bad gets a "-".

Good, Bad, and States

The plusses and minuses can be used in more than "good things happen, bad things happen." For instance, you can plot your character's compliance with his organization. If he's a cop and he finds out his partners are corrupt, a seesaw would start between what matters to him, and what the rules of his group were. Story tension increases because the cop's goals get a negative treatment (partners want to take him out of action before he "rats" on them), while his partners' goals (capturing and convicting bad guys, even if the evidence isn't all real) are rewarded positively within their circle. Obviously, this should become their undoing if this is a cautionary tale, but that's a decision of the writer.

Stories read best when they are fraught with conflict for your characters. There is no growth or emotional experience shared with a reader/viewer if your main character grows up, meets the girl of his dreams, gets married, has kids, and lives a long life. Without conflict and struggle against external and internal forces, characters are just flat lines floating up. Think of Roy Scheider's character in the film Jaws. He starts off with some family concerns. He gets more conflicted when he has to consider closing the beach, and when he starts to worry about how to actually catch this shark. The minuses get piled on and on and on. The story map for Jaws would look like the worst stock market crash ever, if you drew them out.

Practice on Someone Else First

To get the sense of how this works, try sitting down to your next movie-viewing experience at home with a pen and a pad. As the film progresses, draw the up lines and down lines, and add a little scene note to remind yourself what happened. See how movies look when you map them out this way. Good fiction reads the same way. I'll offer that most print fiction has more space for exposition, so there might be more plateau lines within the mix, but otherwise, it'll look similar to a movie.

Map Your Next Story

Try putting the practice into play alongside Doug's agile plotting and some of the other great advice you read here at D*I*Y Planner. You'll see a difference in how your story progresses, and it might unlock some of what's been bothering you about your own work that may not have been evident before. It's another way of visualizing the data contained in your text, which activates your right brain, and you never know how that might open your mind to new possibilities.

D*I*Y Planner - Use a Story Map to Improve Your Plotting - Comments

oops!

Plot mapping should only be

Another story model

I've always heard of mapping

Use a Story Map to Improve Your Plotting

DIY Planner - Use a Story Map to Improve Your Plotting - Comments